Of Bleachers and Brotherhood

A small meditation on the curious matter of strangers cheering as one, and what it tells a fellow about his neighbors.

By Our Regular Correspondent

There is a thing that happens at the ballyard along about the seventh, with the home club a run shy and the tying man dancing off second, that no preacher and no politician has ever managed to duplicate in any building of his own. A fellow who has not spoken a friendly word to the man on his right since the first pitch will, of a sudden, find that man's hand pounding his shoulder, and his own hand pounding back, and neither of them will think it queer.

I have sat in those bleachers next to bankers and next to bricklayers, next to a small boy in short pants and next to an old gent who remembered when the mound was at fifty feet, and I tell you that for the span of three hours we were not any of those things. We were a single shouting creature with five thousand throats and one held breath, and the world's troubles waited politely outside the turnstiles for us to come back to them.

Now a cynical man — and we have a good supply of them in this town — will tell you the feeling is cheap, because it ends when the game ends. He will say it does not count as connection, on account of nobody learned anybody else's name. I respectfully submit that the cynical man has the thing exactly backwards. The names do not make it. The willingness makes it. Five thousand strangers agreed, without a word of debate, to care together about something that did not strictly matter, and in caring together they remembered that they were the same kind of animal.

And here is the hopeful part, friend, and I will say it plain: that willingness is still in us. It is not used up. It waits in every man and woman who has ever stood and roared at a long fly ball, and it can be summoned by any decent occasion that asks for it. The ballyard is only one such occasion. There are others. There will be others. We have only to show up, and to let the cheer escape.

Play ball.